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Friday, August 07, 2009

Has Bradshaw been sidelined by Mandy?

I posted this piece earlier today on HoldtheFrontPage's offsite blog The Journalism Hub but I thought I'd cross-post it here as it may have a wider political interest. It concerns the question of who is now taking overall ministerial responsibility for the government's Digital Britain proposals.

After some confusion as to whether Sion Simon or Stephen Timms would be taking over the Digital Britain brief from the now-departed Lord Carter, Downing Street has now ruled in favour of Mr Timms.

But anyone expecting any degree of clarity from the government over which Whitehall department will be ultimately responsible for implementing the plans will have been sorely disappointed.

The story so far is that Timms will remain in his current role as financial secretary to the Treasury, but with additional ministerial responsibilties at Lord Mandelson's Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

In terms of his Digital Britain responsibilities, he will report to the Business Secretary, rather than the Culture, Media and Sport Secretary Ben Bradshaw, whose department has hitherto led on the Digital Britain report and who personally delivered it in an oral statement to the Commmons back in June.

Meanwhile Mr Simon, as creative industries minister, is to undertake some ill-defined supporting-role in relation to those aspects of Digital Britain which are still the responsibility of the DCMS.

The upshot of all this appears to be that Mr Bradshaw, a former Exeter Express and Echo reporter who has recently made some welcome comments about the threat to regional newspapers posed by council propaganda sheets, has been well and truly sidelined.

A cynical interpretation of this would suggest that Bradshaw, who is also a former BBC reporter, was deemed insufficiently impartial to rule on the vexed issue of whether the BBC licence fee should be top-sliced to fund new regional TV news consortia in which the local press is expected to play a part.

Either way, with so many departments and ministers now apparently involved, the words "too many cooks," "dog's breakfast" and "camel designed by committee" all spring to mind.

"He saw politics very much like Trollope, as the interplay of personalities seeking preferment, rather than, like me, as a conflict of principles and programmes about social and economic change."

Denis Healey, writing about Roy Jenkins in "The Time of My Life."

"I'll tell you what happens with impossible promises. You start with a series of far-fetched resolutions, and these are then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code. And you go through the years sticking to that, outdated, misplaced, irrelevant to the real needs, and you end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council, a Labour council, hiring taxis to scuttle round the city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers. I'll tell you - and you'll listen - you can't play politics with people's jobs and with people's homes and with people's services."

Neil Kinnock, Bournemouth 1985

"But the most eloquent message concerns the Blair government. It must be right at all times. Above all, the integrity of the leader can never be challenged. He never did hype up intelligence. He didn't take Britain to war on any other than the stated terms. Any suggestion of half-truth, or disguised intention, or concealed Bushite promises is the most disgraceful imaginable charge that deserves a state response that knows no limit.

"That's how a sideshow came to take over national life. Now it seems to have taken a wretched, guiltless man's life with it. Such is the dynamic that can be unleashed by a leader who believes his own reputation to be the core value his country must defend."

Hugo Young, on the death of Dr David Kelly, 2003

"The socialism I believe in is everyone working for each other, everyone having a share of the rewards. It's the way I see football, the way I see life."